Appalling Vista

apple sucks

(ducks for cover)

Amusing, but it still isn’t enough to make me buy into the evil empire of Apple!

novakant, ancarett, here in Japan if you want to buy a computer with an English language OS capable of Japanese, you have to pay an extra $600 for the Vista Enterprise edition, which doesn’t come standard on any reasonably priced computer. And on top of that, all the other versions of Vista I have seen handle those language changes very poorly – my partner’s workplace Vista has a printer with no Japanese language support (in Japan!) which crashes her PC, as does switching to the Japanese input (randomly, of course). This means that every time I do a web search for a restaurant or a timetable I am likely going to crash my super-modern up to date PC. Bugger that.

Given that for $1500 or thereabouts you can buy an Apple with fully functioning language support, I didn’t have much choice. So it was Apple for me, and as a bonus I now have working R (R is notoriously shitty on XP – god only knows how useless it will be on Vista). I have used PCs for the past 12 years, and still do in my office, but I have to say that I am not looking back…

I have tried Steve K’s solution twice. The first time, I had to spend 2 days finding the correct binaries to make my graphics card work, and those binaries were wrong. I had to then find the code, work out what was wrong with it, and change it. Just so I could have access to kde. And the network and printer stuff still didn’t work. I too would like my koolaid undiluted, but I also want it to be able to print! So Apple is a perfect compromise, I think.

Steve K, that is a vast improvement in user friendliness! When I did it the first time I had an intel 810 graphics card. The necessary binaries were out there but some were corrupted and the uncorrupted ones had an error in a file path. I basically had to track down a description of exactly what the binaries did, find the error, and correct it. This took a lot of work! So I don’t believe Linux (especially) will ever be user-friendly for idiots like me who like to have a computer which works out of the box. I am willing to pay for that, but not an extra $600 on top of the hardware because some dickhead at Microsoft can’t program a functioning language interface – it’s not like the idea is novel, Apple and Unix have done it for years.

The problem for Microsoft is that just as Apple and Linux are getting more stable (in the case of the former), and more user-friendly (the latter), MS have released a really shit OS with lots of problems. At the same time they have released a new Office to work on this buggy platform, with completely revised and restructured menu systems. This is a big problem for them. I think a large part of MS’s original success (and the reason I stuck wtih them so long) was that combination of stability and a highly user-friendly office system. Now they’ve screwed both of those advantages, just when the competitors have something good to offer. Silly, in my view, especially since modern Apples are price-competitive (even without adding $600 to buy software just so you can get a basic feature).

(Plus, the DRM in Vista gave me the willies. Living in Japan, I get a lot of foreign – i.e. Australian – material sent to me, and I can’t necessarily play it on Japanese equipment. I don’t want my computer to lock me out as well!)

That’s an old laptop! I was doing this maybe 5 years ago – perhaps the chip was different then…? It was in a clone PC, so maybe the motherboard was unusual. I solved the problem, but then I would have had to do the same round of crap for the printers, the network card, …

The DRM problems I have read about seem to be more extreme on Vista than Apple, but will undoubtedly affect Apple to some unpleasant extent. I hadn’t really cared too much about these things in the past, but now I am to a certain extent dependent on foreign content (it is going to be at least 1000 years before I can read Japanese fast enough to read subtitles on a French movie, for example), so I need some flexibility with content access. It would have been nice to use Linux to do this; but of course you have to fiddle with the damn set up to do so.

And here’s the rub: were I to buy a new PC here in Japan, try to install linux and fail, I would then have to install something Vista-like on it. Which would mean either forking out that $600 and/or enduring the instability of the language options. Not to mention incompatibility with a lot of software I download from western sources – and the persistent problem of R.

I think you have deconstructed my binary nicely too btw – now I think about it, I was examining the code for the i810 drivers, not the binary. Given I can’t even tell the difference between those two types of file, it’s no wonder it took me 2 days to get the graphic card working…

I’m pretty sure Macs make you region code your dvd drive.

Depends on what you mean my “make you.” Macs ship with region-coded DVD drives that allow five changes in region. But you can flash their firmware and effectively turn them into region free drives (you still need to use a little freeware app called RegionX to change regions, but you can do this as many times as you like).

Of course, flashing your firmware voids your drive’s warranty.

And doing so would be wrong.

Yes SG, it is a pretty old laptop. I bought it used. I’m poor.

Ben, I had that region menu pop up once when I was using a Mac, and it didn’t let me select the region code I wanted: Region 0. I don’t think selecting Region 0 is immoral. It looks to me like a region dedicated to universal values like truth, beauty, freedom, and cooperation, values that transcend petty local concerns like a particular corporation’s bottom line. I think a more interesting question than the morality of Region 0 is whether it wrong to give your money to the enemies of Region 0, to what Ben Bagdikian calls “the Media Monopoly”? The answer to that question should be clear by now: at no point in time should you give any more of your money to the Media Monopoly. They take it and pollute the public sphere w/ sensationalistic trash like Paris Hilton and Dick Cheney.

Steve K: When a piece of software on my computer doesn’t work it feels sad (not merely frustrating), like my software community is a little dysfunctional. Can you say that when your Windows or Mac doesn’t work?

I don’t actually want to. I have a severe case of depression and have too many problems with routine life making me feel sad. My computer is a tool, and what I care about is that it work like the tools I use in the kitchen and elsewhere in my home, to help me do the things I want to do comfortably and without hassle. I’m a Mac user because Apple hardware and operating system and OSX software do that best for me; friends of mine use different hardware and software as suits them.

As a young man I put a lot more time into my computers more or less as ends in themselves, tinkering with the hardware, tuning the OS and apps, the whole deal. If I were 21 again I’d likely be a fairly hardcore Linux user now. But I’m 42, and computers aren’t my job. I can compile kernels; I just don’t want to. I can set up monitors for nightly updates and patch or recompile programs; I just don’t want to. I like that my computer lets me put more time into the things that I’m actually interested in, in ways that match my physical needs (adjustments to compensate for optic nerve damage, for instance; OSX is way ahead on handicapped accessibility issues, or rather for my issues, just as Windows is the best place for speech recognition for individual users) and my aesthetics.

If I found myself treating my computer as an object of any more intense or more complicated emotions than the appreciation I feel for all well-designed tools, I would promptly ditch it and go find a different computer that didn’t do that.

By the way, Steve K, as a general thing, advocacy works better when it isn’t structured as “Your choices suck…”

That’s amazingly condescending advice you give there, Bruce.

Now I’m thinking maybe I should install Linux. My new job gives me lots more free time I have to fill up somehow! It’s either that, or become an Unfogged commenter.

#11-13. Just install vlc and stop worrying about region codes. It’s a very capable program and runs on everything.

vasi: but does Wubi work when running WinXP Pro on Parallels?

Just kidding. Sort of. Switched back to Mac this past summer and it’s great. Except for the part about half my brain being removed due to my inability to figure out the OSX interface conventions after a ten year absence (just learned how to save to subfolders tonight).

The only thing worse than computers is talking banner ads.